Postmodern Fiction Research Articles

Investigating the Female Subaltern, Colonial Discourse and False Consciousness: A Spivakian Marxist-Postcolonialist Reading of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease

The present research study attempts to investigate Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease in terms of Gayatri Spivak Marxist-Post colonialist conceptions of subaltern, colonial discourse and false consciousness. In Post-modernist fiction, there is anxiety that historical concerns such as the scale of violence in the Second World War, the Nazi genocide, the paranoiac politics of the Cold War and European colonialism have made fiction a medium for history. Chinua Achebe’s novels, indeed, are manifestation of colonialism and its subsequent impact on the literary text and dominant discourse. In exploring these terms, this dissertation endeavors to closely examine Gayatri Spivak’s concept of subaltern in the Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and No Longer at Ease . Furthermore, the present paper demonstrates Spivak’s voice to differences: that is, class categorization and marginalized subaltern subjects. By the emergence of colonialism, the significance of social class and social discourse became predominant; therefore, colonial discourses instilled into the social, cultural construction and literary text, particularly novel. In this regard, the investigation of the dominate discourses is pursued, and this helps to show how colonialism resulted in discourse inculcation. The resistant perspective against ruling ideology, as the Italian Marxist political activist, Antonio Gramsci calls it cultural hegemony is presented through language, tradition, and customs. Finally, the study focuses on Marxist concept of false consciousness from the viewpoint of Antonio Gramsci to Louis Althusser. Keywords: Colonial discourse, Subaltern, False Consciousness, Social Class, Change and Tradition, Language, Culture

RESEARCH METHODS OF GRAPHIC CODING OF NARRATIVE POLYPHONY IN ENGLISH POSTMODERN FICTION TEXT

The author focuses on the methods of graphic (visual) coding of narrative polyphony in English postmodern fiction text. Resting on integrative interdisciplinary approach applied to the study of the issue under analysis, the author substantiates that the graphic surface of postmodern fiction text bears a particular layout, perspective and store of graphic (visual) signs originating from heterogeneous semiotic modes, both verbal and nonverbal. In this paper, the author defines and classifies visual signs as units of graphic coding of narrative polyphony in English postmodern multimodal fiction text. Graphic signs do not only change the graphic surface of the text, but also shape its new narrative structure, both of which construct polysemantic content of the text. Sinking into multimodal research, the author provides a study of the nature of graphic innovations as text units functioning on various text levels, both as attractors and distractors of its coded content that mirror linguistic norm democratization. By illustrating the applied methods in a text fragment from the English multimodal polyphonic fiction narrative, the author concludes that graphic coding units manifest postmodern fiction text as a synergetic whole in that the latter is a self-organized non-linear dissipative system that generates multiple ways of deconstructive text interpretation manipulating the reader. The author strongly believes that the findings may generate consequent research in the field of multimodal narratology.

A Linguistic Game: A Brief Language Analysis of Tripmaster Monkey : His Fake Book

The book Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (TM) is published as a novel, which is Kingston’s first true novel during her writing career. There are many remarkable writing techniques in her trilogy, such as, language usage, narrative perspectives, plot narration and other diverse narrative styles. In this thesis, it aims to focus on one of the most attractive features-its language usage in TM, especially on the names of its title and protagonist which strikingly embodies the significance of readers’ participation and the uncertainty of the language in a postmodern fiction.

The Insistence of the MaterialHabeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the HumanSensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

The Insistence of the MaterialHabeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the HumanSensational Flesh: Race, Power, and Masochism

Metalepsis and the Author Figure in Modernist and Postmodernist Fiction

This paper traces instances of metalepsis in John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister, Karin Fossum’s Broken, and J. M. Coetzee’s Slow Man. In its collapsing of narrative levels, that stylistic device is commonly seen as dramatizing a uniquely postmodern relationship between the author and his or her characters. Such a newly envisioned dynamic has been understood as fiction’s response to the theoretical debate about the so-called death of the author and, more broadly, to the posthumanist discourse on the dissolution of the liberal-humanist subject. In contrast, I argue that, seen as definitive of postmodern poetics, metalepsis stages a peculiarly modernist gesture. Its transgression of diegetic levels ultimately reinforces (rather than undermines) the author figure and thus is incommensurate with the postmodern negotiation of a subjectivity beyond authorial omnipotence. It is only through its gradual extinction that metalepsis serves the postmodern attempt to rethink the author and chart anew its peculiar subject position. In place of the clearly signposted ontological hierarchy on which the device depends, the postmodern promotes a single undifferentiated narrative plane where the author figure is recreated as a fictional character in the process of becoming. The disappearance of the first allows for the resurrection of the latter.

Reading City of Glass as a Post-modern Fiction

Reading City of Glass as a Post-modern Fiction

Remaking the Record: Emigrant Fiction and Restorative Justice in the Former Yugoslavia

As the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) nears its end, questions about victimhood and restorative justice remain salient. Can the law adequately attend to victim trauma? Focusing on the remedial notion of “making whole” a victim of atrocity, this article looks to Aleksandar Hemon’s first novel, The Question of Bruno (2000), to illuminate legal limitations to facilitating human recovery. Hemon is a Bosnian immigrant who departed Sarajevo in 1992 and began writing in English several years later. Exhibiting the fragmentation typical in postmodern fiction, Hemon’s work can be situated in a distinct literary moment. Yet the novel also creates new narrative forms that incorporate the reader in a restorative task. While considering the gaps in the remedial procedures at the ICTY, I argue that The Question of Bruno implores its reader to reconstruct a new kind of historical record that heals, while acknowledging the liminal spaces from which many victims speak and write.

Spontaneous scripts as fictional narrative: an innovation in postmodern fiction

This essay deals with a special text-type in postmodern Chinese fiction which radically deviates from all conventional forms of narrative. Appearing as a “short story” but in the form of a schoolboy’s spontaneous scripts and absent-minded scratches, it presents everything naturalistically in a non-fictional mode. By presenting trivial characters and uneventful happenings in random pieces that constitute a new form of narrative, its author artfully shows rather than tells that life is more realistic in the eyes of a child and is richer, more colorful and meaningful in fragments. With newness on almost all levels of linguistic and narrative presentation, the story practices eventful narration in process narration by interweaving fragments into a highly coherent discourse of fictional narrative. While there is hardly a theme or obvious message in most of the individual pieces, the story as a whole implies undertones of the satire on many aspects of school and family life. This avant-garde literary experiment not only refreshes the reader’s schema of literature and adds to their experience of literary reading, but also contributes to the making of postmodern fiction by enriching the concept of narrative, the definition of narrativity, and ultimately the notion of literature.

Scientific Metafiction and Postmodernism

AbstractThis paper introduces the concept of scientific metafiction, developing it in relation to historiographic metafiction, which questions the truth of historical knowledge and highlights similarities with fiction. Scientific metafiction accordingly is marked by a refusal of the view that only science has a truth claim and by comparing science and fiction as discourses. Thomas Pynchon’s novels are exemplary historiographic metafictions, and I argue that the growing importance of science and scientific metafiction is crucial to the development of the ontological dominant that, according to Brian McHale, characterises postmodernist fiction. Focusing on three novels from the 1970s to the twenty-first century, I demonstrate that the concept of scientific metafiction and its negotiation of concerns also discussed in science studies are central to Pynchon’s work and crucial to its move beyond the epistemological questioning of historiographic metafiction and towards raising ontological concerns.

A cognitive-stylistic response to contradictions

Teske’s paper places structuralist emphasis on the meaningfulness of contradictions and explores how these contradictions may affect readers’ processes of interpretation in postmodern fiction. While I agree with Teske’s analysis of the function of contradictions in the experience of reading postmodern fiction, I introduce a cognitive-stylistic perspective which complements Teske’s structuralist exploration of contradictions. I provide a linguistic analysis of a passage from The Unconsoled to demonstrate the usefulness of this complementary approach. I also consider how drawing on theoretical elements from cognitive stylistics as well as empirical approaches such as reader response may be useful in expanding Teske’s innovative analysis of contradictions.

Fragmentation, Intertextuality and Hyperreality: The Postmodern and Popular Filipino Films

Watching popular films can help students take certain arguments in the theory of knowledge more seriously. Such claims bring to fore what the postmodernist critic Frederic Jameson (1998) refers to as the erosion of distinction between high culture (as represented by philosophy and the act of philosophizing) and popular culture (embodied by popular films) as when these products of mass culture are used as texts for philosophical and literary studies. The present study was designed to analyze popular Filipino films as text, in order to achieve the researcher’s aims: one is to prove that movies can truly be philosophic and literary, by highlighting the dominant features of postmodernist fiction discernible in the selected contemporary films, and how these features were related to the over-all narrative structure, characterization, and thematic content, and more importantly, to participate in the effacement of the line between high art and commercial art, demonstrating in the end that le postmoderne has finally reached the Philippines.

A Demythologized Auto/Biography: Beginnings and Evolution of Metabiography in Feminine Postmodern Fiction

The postmodern features of English fiction like fragmentation and metafictionality seem to find an equivalent in life writing and metabiography. Such instances of metabiography either expose the protagonist in the process of writing a biography or memoir, and/or include extracts of life writings which are textually incorporated in their original format. The aim of this paper is first to explore the structural characteristics of metabiography and its evolution from a theme to a structure/form, through Henry James’s The Aspern Papers (1888), A.S. Byatt’s The Biographer’s Tale (2000) and Marina Warner’s fiction. As Richard Holmes explains, “the boundaries between fact and fiction have become controversial and perilous” (16), boundaries which are crossed by Warner and Byatt, both postmodern female novelists who rely on the plurality of voices and textual collage instead of the conventional omniscient narrator and the linear narrative represented by James. Second, the focus will be on the strategies combining the aesthetic with the ethical, or “the political desire to write the histories of the marginalised, the forgotten, the unrecorded” (Byatt On Histories 10-11) through metabiographical autobiographies and diaries in Warner’s Indigo and The Lost Father. The life writing themes treated in these novels are also studied in relation to the modernist and postmodernist views of reality, history and representation which they reflect. This article was submitted to the European Journal of Life Writing on April 27th 2016, and published on February 21st 2016.

Intertextualidad narrativa: cómo Pacheco se apropia de The Go-Between

Este ensayo aborda la cuestion de la reescritura en la narrativa posmoderna, ya sea que se le denomine apropiacion, adaptacion o la interrelacion entre hipotexto e hipertexto. La parte medular del articulo se centra en una comparacion detallada de las novelas The Go-Between (1953) de H. P. Hartley y Las batallas del desierto (1981) de Jose Emilio Pacheco. Se enfatizan similitudes como la dualidad del narrador nino-adulto, su enamoramiento con una mujer mayor, la experiencia traumatica subsecuente, la recreacion de un pasado distante ya desaparecido, el choque entre niveles sociales antagonicos, la tematizacion discursive de piezas musicales, asi como detalles menores que acercan y hermanan a ambas obras

Absurd Catalogues: The Functions of Lists in Postmodernist Fiction

Lists proliferate in postmodernist narratives, that is, the self-reflexive kind of fiction that reached its heyday in the second half of the twentieth century. This article seeks to determine the functions of these catalogues. First, they serve a metafictional or self-reflexive function. The lists in postmodernist fiction involve stylistic peculiarities through which the text reflects upon and thus foregrounds its status as fiction. Second, they highlight the limits of our compulsive need to impose order on chaos: postmodernist narratives present us with disorganized catalogues to ridicule our pattern-seeking minds, that is, our human attempts to create order and meaning. Third, they convey a certain attitude to life: the catalogues in postmodernist narratives celebrate variety and plurality by illustrating that individual entities cannot (or should not) be forced into a rigid system of order; the lists in postmodernist fiction thus invite us to adopt a playful attitude which closely correlates with the capacity of “letting things be” advocated by Zen masters.

What Are Unnatural Narratives? What Are Unnatural Elements?

What Are Unnatural Narratives? What Are Unnatural Elements? Dan Shen (bio) The research on unnatural narrative theory as represented by Brian Richardson’s work over the past two or three decades has greatly expanded the scope of narrative studies, covering various phenomena neglected in previous investigations of narrative poetics. The works by Richardson and other scholars have devoted much space to explaining and defining what is unnatural. However, the picture is still not that clear. This article tries to [End Page 483] help clarify the issue by revealing the difference between the unnatural in Shakespeare/realist fiction and postmodernist fiction and by classifying different kinds of unnatural elements that break mimetic conventions without breaking the mimetic illusion. shakespeare, realism versus postmodernism In Unnatural Narrative (henceforth UN), Richardson observes that “the key criterion [for the unnatural] will always be the breaking of the mimetic illusion, in whatever form that may take” (93). Since different theorists have come up with different definitions of the unnatural, Richardson says in the Target Essay (henceforth TE): “In our practice, we often find it most useful to point to paradigmatic instances of the unnatural” (394). Here are two such cases offered in the TE: (1) “Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining” (387); (2) “He’s got a car bomb. He puts the keys in the ignition and turns it—the car blows up. He gets out. He opens the hood and makes a cursory inspection. He closes the hood and gets back in. He turns the key in the ignition. The car blows up. He gets out and slams the door shut disgustedly” (Leyner 59). Significantly, the works by writers in the realist tradition, like Cervantes through Fielding and on through Austen and Trollope, preclude such impossible fictional events, which totally violate our understanding of the world. Such events can only appear in avant-garde, experimental fiction, like post-modernism, with essentially different conventions and licenses. In discussing unreliable narration, Tamar Yacobi observes that “the genetic mechanism relegates fictive oddities and inconsistencies to the production of the text; above all, where unresolved otherwise, they are blamed on the (e.g., wavering, negligent, or ideologically fanatic) author. [. . .] Just consider ‘one inconsistency [that] seems like a slip on Tolstoy’s part: in chap. 14, Pozdnysheva is said to have borne six children, while elsewhere it is five’ [Isenberg 167n29]” (111). Such mismatched narration is likely to be taken as a purposefully “unnatural” technique in postmodernist fiction, but tends to be regarded as a careless “slip” when found in a realist text.1 Similarly, no matter whether it is Fielding or Austen or Trollope, had he or she penned “Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining,” we would not be in a position to take it as the unnatural technique of “denarration,” but have to treat it as a puzzling slip in an essentially realist narrative. Realist [End Page 484] fiction does enjoy certain licenses to break the mimetic illusion occasionally, such as a dramatized hetero-extradiegetic narrator’s entering the storyworld or such a narrator’s referring to his/her own narrating power. But usually these occasional elements are not significant enough to subvert the mimetic nature of the whole narrative. Then how about Shakespeare? In UN, Richardson defines Shakespeare as “one of the greatest fabricators of unnatural places, events, and sequences in the history of literature before postmodernism” (102). But we would not expect to find instances like “Outside, it is raining. Outside, it is not raining” in Shakespeare. In the first place, it is impossible to enact such denarration on the stage (if the two sentences concerned are enacted, they would be taken as being sequential: it first rains, then the rain stops). Secondly and more importantly, Shakespeare’s drama still aims at maintaining the mimetic illusion. One example of the unnatural chosen by Richardson is “the play with time” in Hamlet (UN 103–4). When Hamlet sees the ghost just after midnight, he asks, “What art thou that usurp’st this time of night?” (quoted in Richardson, UN 104). A few minutes later “the dawn starts to break and the ghost leaves, as the time of night does indeed seem...

How Unnatural Does It Get?

* Richardson, Brian. Unnatural Narrative: Theory, History, and Practice. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 20x5.197 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8142-1279-0. * Alber, Jan. Unnatural Narrative: Impossible Worlds in Fiction and Drama. Lincoln and London: U of Nebraska P, 2016. 294 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8032-7868-4. Unnatural has become one of the most prominent recent developments in narrative theory. It started around the year 2000 with the work of Brian Richardson, who collected his explorations of narratives in his 2006 study Unnatural Voices. The approach quickly attracted a group of young scholars, focusing on unusual fictional texts and questioning the usual narratological concepts. Among them were Jan Alber, Stefan Iversen, Maria Makela, and Henrik Skov Nielsen. The term unnatural obviously alluded to Monika Fludernik's narratology (1996). Fludernik was inspired by Jonathan Culler's idea of naturalization, stressing the ways in which readers try to turn alienating texts into something they can understand. Richardson, on the other hand, took his cue from postmodernist fiction and poststructuralist theories, stressing the irreducibility of the alien and the exceptional. Culler's is a strategy that turns the peculiar and the unknown into the known. It depends upon and literary supposedly present in readers' heads (138). These models range from general cultural patterns of signification, such as intentionality, to specific literary knowledge of periods and genres. The application of the models normalizes the abnormal: 'Naturalization' emphasizes the fact that the strange or deviant is brought within a discursive order and thus made to seem (137). Fludernik elaborates on and updates Culler's study of these models via cognitive linguistics and discourse analysis. From William Labov she borrows the term narrative--oral, everyday stories people tell each other. Fludernik develops Culler's concept of models into her concept of frames; she uses the term experientiality to describe the central process of normalization (as soon as a reader recognizes a center of experience in a narrative, he or she can come to grips with the text); and she replaces the term with narrativation. Although Fludernik's basic idea is that people tend to normalize the abnormal, she does realize that some texts cannot be fully normalized. such as James Joyce's Finnegans Wake remain unreadable (Towards 293). They result in collapse: When narrativization breaks down, whether incipiently or in full measure, it does so where the consciousness factor can no longer be utilized to tide over radical inconsistency, and this happens first and foremost where overall textual coherence or micro-level linguistic coherence (and cohesion) are at risk. (317) The preference for consistency and narrativization that seems to underlie formulations like these is precisely what Richardson's rejects. Simply put, he sees the process of naturalization as a form of reductionism, which smooths over the problematic aspects of narrative texts and which reformulates the new into something old. In this way, the complex, literary, and disruptive nature of the narrative is disregarded. Unnatural narratology, on the other hand, holds this complex nature in high regard and wants to respect it in its interpretation. The fundamental differences between the two narratological views were formulated clearly in a joint 2010 essay by Alber et al. They claimed that natural and classical are guilty of mimetic reductionism (Unnatural Narratives 115) as they reduce the sophistication of literary narrative to everyday storytelling. The theorists point to three levels of literary unnaturalness (116): storyworlds (in which impossible things happen), minds (e.g., a character that knows he is being narrated by someone else, or an omniscient character), and acts of narration (e. …

Absurd Catalogues: The Functions of Lists in Postmodernist Fiction

Absurd Catalogues: The Functions of Lists in Postmodernist Fiction

Intertextuality and pastiche Technoques of Mark Twain Select Novels

William Dean Howells remembered Twain as “entirely satisfied with the result of the Civil War and . . . eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history.[19] By 1881, Twain had observed the consequences of the Civil War and felt that the freedmen needed help in their new roles in society. Hence twain uses in his two novels Intersexuality and Pastiche techniques. Which means an important element of postmodernism is its acknowledgment of previous literary works. The intersexuality of certain works of postmodern fiction, the dependence on literature that has been created earlier, attempts to comment on the situation in which both literature and society found themselves in the second half of the 20th century: living, working, and creating on the backs of those that had come before.

“I’d sing you a song if I could sing”: Art and Artifice in Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby

“I’d sing you a song if I could sing”Art and Artifice in Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby Jaydn DeWald (bio) Ah, well, I didn’t say it was possible. I said, Try. —Ellen Douglas, Can’t Quit You, Baby Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby (1988) is a prismatic and profoundly subtle novel. And yet, despite its impressive mélange of competing voices and points of view, strategies and techniques, styles and modes—all of which forced readers to approach the narrative from a variety of angles—the novel’s prose and central action quietly belie its ambition. Ostensibly, Can’t Quit You, Baby is about the fraught, long-time relationship of a white mistress, Cornelia, and her African American housekeeper, Julia (nicknamed Tweet), in Civil Rights-era Mississippi. But the novel is in fact as much about the narrator’s—the “tale-teller’s”—struggle to tell a tale that can transcend racial barriers (or is at least capable of it) and at last bring these two women together as true friends, true equals. Such is the layered, pluralistic nature of this novel. Douglas is a magician of novelistic multitasking, and I say “magician” because the multiple, simultaneous tasks are often in contention with one another: the ostensible plot, for example, largely falls under the tradition of realist mimetic fiction, whereas the metafictive tale-teller, among other features, is a staple of postmodern fiction—that is to say, [End Page 58] fiction (post-WWII) that employs pastiche, incorporates (often self-consciously and -referentially) a number of divergent styles/traditions, and in some way fractures or challenges the coherence of a single reliable version of a narrative. In brief, this essay will discuss a variety of ways in which Can’t Quit You, Baby struggles with and against itself; how it both offers and remains skeptical of racial reconciliation, interrogating and embracing the potential for change; how it paradoxically succeeds by failing; how it frees itself from the “illusion of freedom” (38); and how it—like Bernard Malamud’s The Tenants (1971)1—functions within and at the same time abandons the conventions of popular realist mimetic fiction. Before moving forward, however, it’s important to note what “racial barriers” means in the context of this essay, which is precisely, if only partly, what it means in the world at large: it means that “racism is ordinary,” a tenet critical race theorists have long proclaimed. With the exception of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr—an historical tragedy that, in the novel, given the emotional vulnerability such an event engenders, ushers in a scene of potential connection and/or intimacy between Tweet and Cornelia—the racial barriers discussed in this essay, the conflicts Can’t Quit You, Baby attempts (for these two women, at least) to overcome, are not shocking, barefaced discriminations, but rather Cornelia’s continual rehearsal, however unconscious, of quotidian racism, that “system of formalized distortions of thought” (73), to borrow a phrase from Patricia J. Williams, that underpin our daily lives: untold microaggressions; legal rationalizations; feelings of moral or intellectual or civic superiority. As Suzanne W. Jones states in “Writing Southern Race Relations: Stories Ellen Douglas Was Brave Enough to Tell”: “Cornelia, whom Douglas marks physically as hard of hearing, politely listens to Tweet’s stories about white injustice and black hardship, marital infidelity and familial competition over land. But Cornelia does not hear in these stories the evidence of institutionalized racism in the town’s law offices and banks that Ellen Douglas makes sure her readers discern” (31). So long as such underpinnings are upheld, so long as Cornelia fails to discern as well as acknowledge the “ordinary racism” that circumscribes their lives, our two protagonists remain distant strangers; as in Magritte’s L’Assassin Menace (which I’ll discuss later and which appears in chapter five of the novel), the two women remain—despite their physical proximity to one another—in separate spheres, inauspiciously nonintegrated; indeed, unintegrable. [End Page 59] Let us begin, plainly, with an examination of the style and technical features of Douglas’s prose, so entwined with the book’s subject matter, the most...

Nabokov's Literary Legacy: Bridging Russian and American Postmodernism

This paper aims to highlight the importance of V. Nabokov’s ouvre in shaping some aspects of selected Russian and American postmodern novels. In fact, given the complex stratification of different narrative layers that characterises his prose, the extreme attention to details, the constant presence of doubles, linguistic puns and a general playful attitude toward the text, it is quite clear why Nabokov has been recently seen as a precursor and pioneer of the postmodern genre. Lipovetsky ( Russian Postmodernist Fiction , 1999) states that the ‘postmodernist potential’ of Russian modernism is easily demonstrated by the evolution of Nabokov: while works such as The Gift and Invitation to a Beheading embody the modernist canon, Lolita stands as the milestone of the American postmodern aesthetic. Moreover, Couturier considers Lolita , Pale Fire and Ada to be ‘archetypal postmodernist novels’ (‘Nabokov in Postmodernist Land’ in Critique 34, no. 4, 1993). The presence of an unreliable narrator who despotically plays with the characters’ lives ( Pnin , Look at the Harlequins! ), testifies once more how blurred is the line between the role of ‘director’ and ‘character’: this key feature of the postmodernist narration (and metafiction) generates a tension that results in irony and self-referentiality. Barthes’s concept of ‘the death of the Author’ is clearly represented in Nabokov’s prose: the author’s presence merges with the text itself and pours into the characters’ actions, dialogues and behaviours. It is not by chance that Nabokov entrusts his last reincarnation, Vadim Vadimych N., with what may be considered his manifesto ‘the “I” of the book cannot die in the book’ ( Look at the Harlequins! ). Thus, Nabokov’s modernist metafiction has evolved into something different, something new, and as Hassan ( The Postmodern Turn , 1987) points out, modernism and postmodernism are not to be considered separated: postmodernism is in fact a continuation of modernism, a logical evolution of the previous literary movement and a physiological reaction to the contemporary society. However, as this paper will show, Nabokov is not only to be considered as a bridge between modernism and postmodernism: he also represents the link between Russian and American postmodern literatures. By focusing on V. Pelevin’s The Sacred Book of the Werewolf (where the protagonist A Hu-Li is a revised - supernatural - version of Lolita) and T. Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (where the allusions to Nabokov’s style are frequent) we shall highlight the nabokovian elements present in these novels and demonstrate how Nabokov is in fact the keystone to the arch of Russian and American postmodernism. In conclusion, the explicit tribute paid by Pynchon (a former pupil of his) and Pelevin (considered nowadays as ‘the Nabokov of the cyber-age’) to the author’s unique style, will allow us to unveil where the ‘new Nabokov’ lies and how he may indeed be seen as a literary Charon, who ferries the characters’ souls across space (Russian and American) and time (modern and postmodern).